In a recent Financial Times interview, Germany’s former Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer slams Chancellor Angela Merkel for renouncing “any claim to leadership in shaping Europe’s response to the financial and economic crises” and for “acting purely nationally”. In contrast, Fischer praises UK prime minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy for having “made more decisive contributions” to help solve the ongoing crisis. Furthermore, Fischer describes the $15.3 billion fiscal stimulus package passed by Berlin last week only as “business as usual, not a strategic response to the crisis”. Finally, in view of the severe slowdown now threatening the German economy, Mr. Fischer called for “far more decisive action”, including large-scale infrastructure investments. “We are now wasting whatever margin of manoeuvre we still have left”, Fischer added.

Well, last time I checked, the 60-year-old high school drop-out is not exactly known to be an authority on complex international economic and financial matters. In fact, Mr. Fischer spent much of his young adult life (he turned 20 in 1968…) as part of Germany’s radical left-wing student movement, fighting the Capitalist establishment, trying to organize workers at car manufacturer Opel for the coming Communist revolution, battling German police in violent street demonstrations, and so on. You get the picture.

Germany’s demographic troubles are well known: Fewer and fewer women are having babies; and even if they do have kids, it often doesn’t happen before they are already well into their 30s. The long-term economic, social, and political consequences of this unprecedented demographic meltdown in Germany and other European countries are staggering. Given the urgency of the situation, it is absolutely shocking to learn that a growing number of German Kindergartens have recently been forced to shut down because nasty neighbors took legal action against what they described as “noise pollution” stemming from playing children.

So far, German courts in major cities such as Berlin, Munich, and Heidelberg have already sided with the plaintiffs. Unfortunately, the judges failed to ask the plaintiffs two obvious yet important questions: First, who exactly do you expect to pay for your costly “pay-as-you-go” retirement benefits in the future? (Hint: maybe the kids playing next door?). And two, why don’t you just move on and relocate to a place that is really quiet (Hint: maybe closer to a retirement community?). In this context, the proliferating legal actions taken against Kindergartens in Germany could certainly hamper Chancellor Merkel’s ambitious new plan to triple the number of Kindergarten/daycare spots for children under the age of 3 to 750,000 by 2013.

A recently-surfaced anti-Bundeswehr poster showing three German soldiers standing next to the flag-draped coffin of a comrade killed in a 2002 helicopter crash in Afghanistan has caused considerable political uproar in Germany. The cynical poster--first published about five years ago by the Berlin branch of the ultra-left wing pacifist “Bureau for Anti-Military Measures”--hails the death of the German soldier as a “Step Towards Disarmament”. The caption reads “We greet this concrete measure to reduce the size of the military one-by-one.” In an interview with Germany’s mass daily Bild, conservative defense minister Franz-Josef Jung condemned the poster as “tasteless” and “irresponsible”. Belatedly, the parent organization of the “Bureau for Anti-Military Measures” has now also come out with a lame statement describing the poster as an “inappropriate form of addressing the issue of Germany’s involvement in war.” Despite the strong political backlash, the Bureau’s website is still featuring the poster prominently on its website.

A full-page op-ed in Germany’s prestigious conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung caught my eye last Wednesday. Titled “Preventive Nuclear War in Europe”, the article (which is not available online) describes in great detail the Warsaw Pact’s secret military planning for a first-strike massive nuclear surprise attack on Germany and Western Europe during the Cold War. The two highly-respected authors – Dr. Hans Ruehle, a senior ranking German defense ministry official and his son Michael Ruehle, who currently serves as the head NATO’s Policy Planning and Speech Writing Section – base their analysis primarily on relevant Warsaw Pact documents recently declassified by the Czech government.

The Warsaw Pact’s nuclear strategy devised by the Kremlin was heavily influenced by the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While Moscow feared that a direct nuclear exchange with America could lead to an Armageddon-type doomsday scenario, the Soviet leaders apparently believed that they could win a limited regional war in Europe by launching a massive surprise nuclear attack on Western Europe, destroy US / NATO nuclear weapons / troops stationed there, and then move in with Red Army tanks to spread the Communist world revolution. The Kremlin fully expected that in a potential European war, the United States / NATO would eventually use nuclear weapons first anyway to counter the Soviet’s huge advantage in conventional forces. Also, ever since Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” surprise attack in 1941, Stalin and other Soviet leaders after him were in an “offense is the best defense” mindset, believing that they had to rely on first-move advantages to deal with the perceived military and technological threats posed by the United States and NATO.

Barack Obama may have left Berlin more than a week ago, but the political repercussions of his speech to about 200,000 people there can still be felt. First came John McCain’s controversial Barack-Obama-Is-The-Biggest-Celebrity-In-The-World-But-Is-He-Ready-To Lead?
ad. Then the Republican National Committee launched a parody-type campaign spot that mocks, among other things, the Obama supporters in Berlin by comparing their Obamania to the fondness of many Germans for Knight Rider and Baywatch “star” David Hasselhoff during the 1980s. While the RNC ad seemed to gain only little traction in the United States, German media like DER SPIEGEL certainly picked up on it.

Despite the depiction of Obama being treated to the political equivalent of the “Love Parade” during his trip there, many Germans who witnessed his speech weren't exactly starstruck.

My friends at the Berlin-based Internet think tank Atlantic-community.org conducted a number of video interviews with rally attendees who generally provided a much more nuanced assessment of the Democratic presidential candidate than most mainstream media reports would suggest:

Generally favorable towards Obama, many of the attendees we spoke to during the rally indicated they had come to hear the speech out of curiosity and interest in politics, rather than a specific desire to admire the presidential nominee. When asked about what changes in transatlantic relations they would expect under an Obama presidency, most people surveyed for our video gave a rather pragmatic assessment, suggesting a definite improvement in ties, but no radical deviation from the greater continuity of US foreign policy. […]

Obama’s popularity in Germany is not based on him being the anti-Bush, but on his ability to reaffirm belief in ideals cheapened through the hypocrisy of the Bush administration. Germans favor Obama, not because he will set American foreign policy on a different course, but because they expect him to return it to its traditional path--a constellation they are comfortable with.

Last week, German defense minister Franz-Josef Jung announced that Berlin plans to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan this fall to support the NATO-led military effort there. This deployment will bring the number of Bundeswehr ISAF soldiers to 4,500, bolstering Germany’s position as the third-largest troop contributor to the Afghanistan mission after the United States and the UK. At the same time, defense minister Jung also said that Germany would cut the maximum number of troops deployed under the separate OEF mandate--which allows Bundeswehr soldiers and several German navy vessels to participate in U.S.-led anti-terror operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, etc.--from 1,400 to 800 this fall. Unlike ISAF, the OEF mission is not specifically covered by a UN Security Council resolution. Furthermore, on July 1, Germany is taking over the NATO Quick Reaction Force from Norway. This is a potentially dangerous, “highly kinetic” rapid-response mission designed to protect ISAF troops against Taliban ambushes.

As required by the German constitution, the strengthened ISAF mandate must be approved by parliament in October. The new mandate will have a 14-month term--rather than the usual one-year duration--in a calculated move to keep the Bundeswehr’s politically controversial Afghanistan mission out of Germany’s next hotly contested general election on September 27, 2009. Last week, the German Bundestag’s budget committee also approved about $750 million in additional military procurement, including 98 state-of-the-art armored “Dingo 2” vehicles that are used by Bundeswehr troops in Afghanistan.

For Chancellor Merkel and her conservative CDU/CSU allies, the beefed-up Afghanistan deployment carries significant political risks. After all, more than two-thirds of the German population are in favor of a swift Bundeswehr withdrawal from Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel’s left-wing SPD “grand coalition” partner remains largely supportive of her Afghanistan policy; the same goes for the Greens--even though both parties would prefer to put more emphasis on the reconstruction component rather than the anti-terrorist component of the NATO deployment. For the SPD and the Greens, of course, a sudden populist volte-face is not easy to pull off politically; after all, it was the previous left-wing Red-Green coalition government under Chancellor Schroeder that first decided to deploy German Bundeswehr troops to Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

So far, only the populist Left Party is running on a clear “Out of Afghanistan Now!” platform. For them, this issue provides a golden opportunity to attract far-left SPD supporters as well as pacifist voters from other parties to their ranks. And indeed, the Left Party is surging in national opinion polls (now standing at 15 percent) while the SPD is hovering around an all-time low of about 22 percent.

Germany’s ruling conservative CDU/CSU parties are trying to push the EU to provide asylum for tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees--including many Christians and members of other religious minorities--who fled religious persecution in their homeland and are now stranded in neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan. This Thursday, all 27 EU interior ministers are scheduled to meet in Luxembourg, where German CDU minister Wolfgang Schaeuble will make the case for why Europe can and should do more to help the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees (which refers primarily to Iraqi Christians as well as Yazidis and Sabian Mandaeans).

At an EU meeting in mid-April, the interior minister of Slovenia--which holds the rotating EU presidency during the first half of 2008--had rejected the Schaeuble initiative because of its alleged pro-Christian bias. In fact, Slovenia’s press release announcing the upcoming June 5 ministerial meeting does not even make a reference to the Iraqi refugee crisis (in contrast, it highlights virtually all the other topics that will be on the agenda). For conservative Berlin insiders the situation is quite clear. Slovenia, the first of the recently admitted member states to assume the EU presidency, is trying to play it safe by staying clear of a politically sensitive and controversial issue like the Iraq refugees.

Germany now hopes that an EU-wide solution will be found after France takes over the EU presidency in July. Just a few days ago, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner announced that France will provide asylum to about 500 Iraqi refugees, primarily Chaldean Catholics. Admitting several hundred persecuted Iraqis is an important step in the right direction. But more needs to be done. It is encouraging that French President Sarkozy has made immigration and border security issues a top priority of France’s EU presidency. In particular, Sarkozy wants the 27 EU members to agree on a joint “European immigration pact” that would strengthen the bloc’s external border controls and make it easier to expel those illegal aliens (i.e., economic refugees) already inside the Union. At the same time, though, Paris has demonstrated that it wants to keep the door open for those refugees that are really persecuted for religious or political reasons (like the Iraqi Christians).

One can only hope that Berlin and Paris can convince their fellow EU members to do their fair share in alleviating the suffering of Iraq’s refugees (Sweden is a notable exception in this regard). Last Wednesday, Erika Steinbach, the CDU/CSU Bundestag group’s spokeswoman on human rights, declared that Germany would go ahead on its own and admit thousands of Iraqi refugees if the EU fails to agree on common approach by the time of a key EU ministerial meeting in Paris in September.

Earlier this week, Germany’s ruling conservative CDU/CSU parliamentary group boldly called for the creation of a new "National Security Council." The German NSC would be tasked with coordinating the country’s various ministries and agencies as they manage foreign and security policy challenges at home and abroad. In essence, the new NSC -- to be attached to the German Chancellor’s office -- would be a much beefed-up version of the existing "Federal Security Council," a largely obscure inter-agency cabinet-level grouping headed by the Chancellor that normally meets only on an ad-hoc basis, primarily to approve military export licenses. Among other things, the CDU/CSU paper also made a renewed push to loosen current constitutional restrictions on the use of military forces inside Germany in the event of a major terrorist attack or large-scale natural disaster.

For far too long, in other words, German political leaders shied away from communicating a comprehensive strategic framework that defines the country’s national interests and addresses responses to the various threats. The conservative strategy paper defines Germany’s national interests in terms of five issue areas: (1) the fight against terrorism; (2) nuclear proliferation; (3) energy and pipeline security; (4) climate change; and (5) the prevention of conflicts.

The CDU/CSU initiative triggered massive criticism from both their left-wing SPD coalition partner and the major opposition parties; all of whom view the proposed NSC as a brazen attempt to diminish the role of the Bundestag and to unduly centralize foreign and security policy making inside the Chancellery. For example, SPD Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- the most likely challenger to Angela Merkel in the 2009 general elections -- charged that the U.S. NSC had been a failure. Steinmeier said that in the run-up to the Iraq war, the NSC had "suppressed all counterarguments" to the 2003 invasion. "This cannot be the model for us," he said. The co-chairwoman of the Greens, well known for her headline-grabbing statements, even went as far as saying that the CDU/CSU paper amounted to a "de-facto declaration of a state-of-war in Germany."

Kurt Beck, the leader of Germany’s left-wing SPD party, which is part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s "grand coalition" government, has been hit hard by new polling data suggesting that even a majority of his own party members think he’s not the right guy for the top job in Berlin. The 59-year-old, fully-bearded Beck, who comes across as a baroque, dull, and uninspiring politician, has served as Minister-President (or Governor) of Rhineland-Palatinate since 1994. Since taking the reins of the SPD in May 2006, Beck has turned out to be a big disappointment for the party faithful and he has failed to acquire the kind of national stature and strong leadership reputation necessary to successfully challenge the incumbent conservative CDU leader Angela Merkel for the Chancellorship in the fall of 2009, when the next general elections are scheduled to take place.

According to a recent opinion survey conducted by Infratest dimap, 69 percent of the respondent were "less or not satisfied" with Kurt Beck. In contrast, Chancellor Merkel’s scored the best result of all German politicians--68 percent indicated that they were "very satisfied" or "satisfied" with her handling of political affairs. In this context, it is important to point out Beck’s strongest intra-party rival, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, scores 66 percent, the second-best rating of any politician in Germany after Angela Merkel. In a hypothetical direct-election match-up with Merkel (in Germany, the chancellor is elected indirectly by the Bundestag members), Beck would only receive 14 percent of the vote (Merkel would get a solid 68 percent). Even among SPD supporters, a stunning 58 percent would back Merkel. In contrast, only 25 percent of Beck’s own party faithful would support his candidacy. Such figures are truly devastating.

At this stage, it is clear that Kurt Beck will not be the SPD nominee to run against Merkel in the fall of 2009. Rather, one can assume that Foreign Minister Steinmeier will fight for Germany’s most powerful position next year. In this context it is certainly noteworthy that the 52-year-old Steinmeier (he served, inter alia, as former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s chief of staff) has never held elected office before. In fact, he was just recently given a safe SPD district in the former East Germany from which he will run for the Bundestag in 2009. If national elections were held now, the results would be as follows: CDU/CSU: 37 percent; SPD: 27 percent; Left Party: 12 percent; Greens: 10 percent; FDP: 10 percent; others: 4 percent. The big question, of course, is what kind of coalition government will emerge after the next general elections: a center-right CDU/CSU-FDP coalition, a Red-Red-Green (SPD-Left Party-Green) coalition, an SPD-FDP-Green "traffic light coalition", a CDU/CSU-FDP-Green "Jamaica coalition", or another CDU/CSU-SPD "grand coalition"?

German conservative interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has come out with a bold initiative to provide asylum for thousands of Iraqi Christians forced to leave their homeland in recent years because of religious persecution at the hands of Muslim extremist groups. According to the Schaeuble plan, which is backed by the interior ministers of the 16 German states, Iraqi Christians would be allowed to stay in Germany until conditions on the ground in Iraq have improved to the point where they can return home. While the Interior Ministry has not officially come out with any concrete refugees quotas, Berlin insiders believe that Germany could end up accepting anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 Iraqi Christians per year.

For far too long, European governments have ignored the terrible fate suffered by Iraq’s most vulnerable minority; Christians, after all, are viewed by both Sunni and Shia terrorists as supporters of the American-led "Crusader Coalition." Scandinavian countries like Sweden have already granted asylum to tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees, many of them Christians. In Germany, in contrast, the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees scattered around neighboring countries like Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, has only recently garnered attention. Catholic and Protestant church organizations in Germany have been particularly vocal. At the moment, Iraq is already the number one country of origin of asylum seekers in Germany. In 2007, 4,327 Iraqis applied for asylum, more than twice the number compared to the year before.

So far, politicians from Germany’s governing conservative CDU/CSU parties have taken the lead in calling for new asylum programs specifically targeted at Iraqi Christians. In contrast, their left-wing SPD coalition partners and the opposition Green party have voiced skepticism about the Schaeuble initiative. For example, Brigitte Zypries, Germany’s SPD justice minister, argued that "It’s a difficult path when you start saying that we’re accepting somebody because of their religious conviction."

The Greens, a party with a long track record of calling on Germany to open the floodgates to refugees and asylum seekers from virtually around the world, voiced reservations, too. "We have to help everybody who is persecuted and cannot say there are our Christian brothers and sisters, and for others with a different identity we don’t care," says Volker Beck, a senior Green MP. Finally, Wolfgang Schaeuble’s other 26 EU partners yesterday rejected his call for a similar EU-wide refugee plan at a ministerial-level meeting in Luxembourg. Countries such as Slovenia (which currently holds the rotating EU presidency) and Luxembourg were particularly opposed to the German initiative, arguing again that one must not single out Iraqi Christians for preferential asylum treatment.

Cüneyt C.
From Spiegel Online

The on-going debate in Germany about the growing threat posed by homegrown Islamic terrorists is about to shift into a higher gear. Remember, last September German police arrested three Islamists (one Turk and two German converts) who were plotting a massive car bombing of Frankfurt airport on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. That incident was already enough to trigger another acrimonious political debate about how far the government can go to fight terrorism and protect the homeland.

Now there are new reports that a 28-year old German-born Turkish citizen allegedly linked to the Frankfurt bombers and identified as Cüneyt C. carried out a suicide attack on U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan on March 3. The blast killed two American soldiers and two Afghan civilians. If the statement posted on the website of the Uzbek terror group Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) is true, that would make him the first suicide bomber from Germany. The IJU hails Cüneyt C. as "a brave Turk who came from Germany and gave up his luxury life style to enter paradise."

According to Germany’s Federal Criminal Agency BKA, Cüneyt C., who left Germany with his wife and two children in April 2007, is thought to have traveled to Afghanistan via Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. At least so far, there’s no proof that Cüneyt C. was indeed the man who crashed an explosives-laden car into the gates of the government district center in the Yaqoubi district, about a one-hour drive from the Afghan-Pakistani border. German investigators are still working with their U.S. and Afghan counterparts to obtain relevant DNA evidence to confirm the identity of the March 3 suicide bomber. As one German officer put it, "We do not have any 100 percent evidence that Cüneyt C. was part of the attack, but the story is too plausible to be a simple propaganda hoax." The IJU has already announced that it will post Cüneyt’s video testament in the days to come.

For sure, the fact that Islamic terrorists who grew up in Germany go to Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. to fight the jihad is nothing new. Last October, for example, Turkish citizen Sadullah K. from the state of Hesse was killed on the battlefield in Pakistan. But the thought that Turks who grew up in Germany (and often hold both passports) could now be turned into deadly suicide bombers represents a nightmare scenario for German security forces.

Really:

Jamaleldine doesn't even crack a smile when he talks about how, in 1991, he joined in anti-American protests on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm boulevard during Operation Desert Storm. "That was the way it was back then," he says. He was 15 and "America was simply the enemy."

It took a full 14 years before Jamaleldine finally -- and radically -- changed his views on the Americans. It was on June 6, 2005, in the middle of the Iraq war, when he showed up at the US Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, to enlist.

Jeff Jamaledine is a German citizen, born in Berlin to a German mother and a Gambian father. He now lives in Germany after having served two tours in Iraq and having been wounded twice. The second wound was nearly fatal--he was shot in the face at close range in a battle that claimed the lives of two Americans and at least 27 jihadists.

It's really one of the most remarkable stories I've read of action in Iraq. When Jamaledine was shot, there were no medevac helicopters in the area. There were Apaches. But the Apache is a two seater--no room for cargo, or wounded. When the call went out--by a soldier who was himself wounded--that Jamaledine needed to be evacuated immediately, one of the Apaches landed on the scene and had him strapped in. This meant the co-pilot had to "hang on outside" for the trip back to the base. Both of the crew were risking their jobs, but they got Jemaldine out. The Apache's crew then rejoined the battle, with the co-pilot sitting in a pool of blood for the rest of the night.

Spiegel quotes an argument between Jamaledine and his father over the war:

The father ends up saying: "I am in favor of peace." To which Jeff responds: "But someone has to achieve that peace." The father repeats: "I am in favor of peace."

That sounds an awful lot like the argument between the candidates in this year's election. When asked what his personal contribution to peace has been, Jamaledine responds, "killing terrorists." Will the American people find that answer more persuasive than the candidate who simply keeps repeating "I am in favor of peace"?

PS: Jamaledine became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2006. Let's hope he comes home soon.

HT: Neptunus Lex

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s recent four-day trip to Germany--during which he not only demanded that Berlin fund the launch of new Turkish-language schools and universities but also dared to call on the 2.5 million Turks living there to reject assimilation into German society--has provoked sharp criticism from German politicians of virtually all political stripes, including top leaders from the ruling CDU/CSU-SPD "grand coalition." In his speech to more than 20,000 supporters of Turkish origin in Cologne on Sunday, Erdogan went so far as to call assimilation "a crime against humanity."

CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel, who normally prefers to strike a rather diplomatic note, was unusually blunt in criticizing Erdogan’s provocative statements. She said "no" to more Turkish-language classes (in her view, the Turks living in Germany should focus on taking advantage of government-sponsored German classes to improve their often weak language skills) and also stressed that Germans of Turkish origin owed their loyalty to the German state.

According to Germany’s Der Spiegel, the message of Erdogan’s speech, which was not translated from Turkish into German, was exactly the opposite:

His speech, in which the phrases "we Turks" and "the Germans" appear again and again, does deliver a clear message: You may live in Germany, but you are Turks--and I am your prime minister.

Erdogan’s visit came at a particularly sensitive time in Turkish-German relations and was overshadowed by a recent house fire in the city of Ludwigshafen that killed nine Turks, including several children. Despite the fact that the exact cause of the fire has not yet been established, Turkish media (both in Turkey and in Germany) immediately seized on the tragedy, declaring it a case of racially motivated arson.

So far, German fire investigators, assisted by several experts dispatched by the Turkish government, have already determined that the fire broke out in the basement. The investigation’s preliminary result is extremely important since it flatly refutes earlier, conflicting statements by two young Turkish girls who claimed to have seen a man setting the fire in the stairway. According to German media reports, the Turkish grandfather of the two girls has already confirmed to the police that the fire started in the basement.

A strongly-worded letter by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates requesting the deployment of German combat troops and helicopters to southern Afghanistan has caused a major political backlash in Berlin.

Both the content and timing of Gates’s blunt letter to his German counterpart Franz-Josef Jung, which was leaked yesterday by the center-left paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, have left even staunchly pro-American politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU parties supporting Chancellor Merkel astounded and annoyed. The German response was swift. Speaking at a hastily arranged press conference in Berlin earlier today, CDU defense minister Jung offered this terse statement:

"I remain convinced that we should continue and fulfill our (current Bundeswehr) mandate in Afghanistan."

Even Chancellor Merkel’s usually soft-spoken spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm weighed in on the discussion, emphasizing that his boss had already made it very clear on a number of occasions that a change in the Bundeswehr’s current Afghanistan mandate (which needs yearly parliamentary approval) "is not a topic for discussion."

The Pentagon’s aggressive attempt to get this key ally to cough up more troops for Afghanistan (right now, Berlin has 3,500 soldiers there, the third-blargest NATO contingent overall) comes at the very time that the German government is considering a new NATO request to deploy about 250 additional Bundeswehr troops as part of the Alliance’s Quick Response Force (QRF) in northern Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Gates letter had the effect of putting those CDU/CSU politicians on the political defensive when they were already arguing in favor of Germany taking over the dangerous QRF mission in the North.

For example, even someone like Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg--a prominent CSU Bundestag member who sits on the foreign relations and defense committees and travels to Washington frequently--felt compelled today to issue a press release calling the tone of Gates’s letter "inappropriate" and urging the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. administration to "straighten its lines of communication."

The leading candidate to be elected to Germany’s Constitutional Court, Horst Dreier, has come under fierce criticism by left-wing media and the Green party for supporting the concept of "rescue torture" as a means of last resort to prevent imminent, large-scale terrorist attacks. In essence, this is the German version of the ticking time-bomb debate, and the political stakes are high. If confirmed, the 53-year old law professor would also take over as president of the Constitutional Court in 2010.

Dreier made the controversial case in favor of "rescue torture" in a law textbook that is required reading at most German law schools. Just two weeks ago, the incumbent top judge, Hans-Juergen Papier, made headlines when he came out strongly against current German government's plans to authorize the in extremis downing of hijacked civilian airliners.

Judge Papier has also made it clear that he strictly opposes all forms of torture, even when employed as a measure of last resort. To back up his point, Papier invokes Article 1 of the country’s Basic Law which states that "The dignity of man is untouchable."

The irony of all this is that Judge Papier is a member of the law-and-order conservative CSU party, whereas Horst Dreier belongs to the left-wing SPD party that also nominated him for the Constitutional Court. In Germany, judges for the country’s top court must be jointly confirmed by both legislative chambers, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. Traditionally, the judges are nominated on a rotating basis by the two biggest political party formations, the conservative CDU/CSU and the left-wing SPD. In the past, the nomination and confirmation of Germany’s top judges was never really controversial. Everything was worked out behind the scenes ahead of time.

This time, the Greens broke that tradition, knowing that they could score valuable political points in a debate where roughly 90 percent of the German population is strictly opposed to using any kind of torture, regardless of circumstance. It remains to be seen whether this politically inconvenient torture debate will make the SPD withdraw its Constitutional Court nominee before the vote set for February 15. Dreier, for his part, defended his controversial stance: "I wrote what I wrote and I stand by it."

After the Bundeswehr’s ISAF and OEF mandates were renewed for another twelve months by the German parliament in October and November 2007, respectively, it seemed that the country’s military engagement in Afghanistan would be on the political backburner until later this summer. By that point existing domestic fault lines about the success or failure, legitimacy or illegitimacy, of the deployment were bound to come again to the fore ahead of the next annual parliamentary vote on the controversial deployment.

This Wednesday, however, the German defense ministry announced that about 240 Bundeswehr soldiers may take over from Norway the command of NATO’s Quick Reaction Force (QRF) in northern Afghanistan. The left-wing SPD party (which is part of Chancellor Merkel’s governing "grand coalition"), the Greens, and even the free-market FDP party are already positioning themselves against the Afghanistan deployment in a way that could yield electoral benefit in the future.

Already two-thirds of the German population is in favor of a swift Bundeswehr pullout from Afghanistan and views the U.S.-led OEF mission in a negative light.

The CDU/CSU-led defense ministry, for its part, stressed that no formal decision about the QRF--which provides force protection or serves as emergency back-up for NATO troops--would be made until a meeting with other NATO members later this month. Specifically, a spokesman for conservative CDU defense minister Franz-Josef Jung made clear his position that Germany’s involvement in the QRF would be covered by the current ISAF mandate and would therefore not require a new vote by the Bundestag.

However, Rainer Arnold, the SPD Bundestag group’s defense policy spokesman, immediately seized on the ministry’s pronouncements to warn that the Bundeswehr’s mission in Afghanistan would take on a "new quality" if Berlin took over the QRF command. In this context, he emphasized that the Bundeswehr infantry troops assigned to the QRF would be deployed for "combat missions" whereas Germany’s current ISAF troops were only involved in "stabilization missions." Several other SPD and FDP MPs concurred with Arnold’s assessment.

Hans-Juergen Papier, president of Germany’s Constitutional Court, has sharply criticized plans by conservative CDU interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble to amend the country’s Basic Law to allow for the downing of hijacked terrorist planes over German airspace as a measure of last resort.

According to advance excerpts of an interview to be published by Der Spiegel on Monday, Papier essentially argues that the calculated killing of innocent passengers aboard civilian airlines through government action could never be justified and was always going to be incompatible with Article 1 of the Basic Law, which states that "The dignity of man is untouchable".

Germany’s "Air Security Act," which includes the controversial shoot-down clause, was initially passed under the previous left-wing Red-Green government and entered into force in January 2005. In February 2006, however, the Constitutional Court ruled that this particular anti-terrorist provision was unconstitutional.

While Germany’s ruling conservative CDU/CSU parties want to change the constitution to give the government the necessary means to protect Germany against the unprecedented threats of the post-9/11 world, they fall short of the two-thirds parliamentary majority required for any such amendments. Virtually all opposition MPs, and even many members of the governing left-wing SPD party--who had previously voted for the contested law--are now dragging their feet, clinging to an outdated, pre-9/11 vision of the world.

During his interview, Papier also came out against interior minister Schaeuble’s proposal to declare terrorists "enemies of the legal order." Back in July 2007, Schaeuble had caused political uproar in Germany when he called, inter alia, for the indefinite detention and "targeted killing" of terror suspects. In this context, Germany’s top judge deemed "the entire discussion about certain people being outside legal jurisdiction and having enemy status as completely inappropriate."

The folks at Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading weekly newsmagazine, displayed a remarkable lack of judgment and timing in picking "The Koran: The World’s Most Powerful Book" as their cover story right before Christmas. While it is certainly true that the world’s most dangerous terrorists as well as their growing base of radical sympathizers feel inspired by the Koran’s radical interpretations, this does not necessarily turn it into the world’s "most powerful" book.

Furthermore, the timing of the article’s publication just days before Christmas (which is Christianity’s second most important religious feast) could easily be misinterpreted as a declaration of surrender or appeasement by Europe’s biggest news magazine. It does not make much of a difference that Dutch author Leon de Winter, who wrote an essay about Muslims in Europe as part of Der Spiegel’s cover story, comes to this rather bold conclusion:

Some social scientists are warning of the dawn of "Eurabia", i.e. an Islamized Europe. In fact, everything points in the opposite direction: Europe is not being Islamized, but Islam is being Europeanized.

De Winter, unfortunately, fails to back up his wishful-thinking scenario with hard facts. However, by describing the Koran as the world’s most powerful book, Der Spiegel certainly hedged its bets and at least made sure that it would not be attacked by Muslims, verbally or otherwise, the way that Jyllands-Posten was in the wake of the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy. In fact, a cursory look at recent Internet chat room discussions about the article among German-speaking Muslims indicate a great deal of surprise that such a "left-wing magazine," which some users suspected of "Jewish connections," would publish such an article in the first place. We're surprised, too, but for different reasons.

A new study commissioned by the German interior ministry about the increasingly radicalized religious and political beliefs of the country’s more than three million Muslims has triggered a political earthquake and much soul-searching about how to confront the rising security threat posed by home-grown Islamic terrorists. The key findings of the 510-page report--which is based on almost 2,000 phone interviews conducted by criminology experts, and had already been initiated under the previous left-wing Red-Green government--are rather disturbing.

First, the study reports that 40 percent of all Muslims in Germany are “fundamentally oriented”. While this label does not necessarily make them hard-core Islamic fundamentalists, it nonetheless means that there are 1.2 million Muslims who practice their faith very strictly “with a tendency to exclude moderate Muslims, to glorify Islam, and to look down on Western / Christian-oriented cultures”. Second, 12 percent of all Muslims in Germany can be described as anti-Democratic, “Islamic-authoritarian”; they harbor very hostile attitudes towards Western societies and are strong believers in meting out the death penalty and other harsh forms of corporal punishment in full accordance with Sharia law. In this context, the experts also believe that there is the potential for “an Islamic-connotated radicalization” in the range of 10-12 percent of all Muslims in Germany.

Third, 6 percent of Germany’s Muslims -- equivalent to about 180,000 people -- have an “affinity to violence” in the sense that they either tolerate or support religiously or politically motivated violence, i.e., terrorism, in the name of Islam. Fourth, radical Islamist ideas in Germany are equally common among both poor, un-educated Muslims and their better-educated, more wealthy, and, supposedly, better-integrated co-religionists. Finally, and probably most worrisome, is the study’s finding that young Muslims--including many second or third generation children of immigrants who were born and raised in Germany and have German passports--are especially prone to embrace violence, radical Islamist beliefs as well as anti-semitism. In essence, most of these radicalized youth embrace a simplistic “single narrative” and believe that world events today are driven by a vast Jewish-Christian campaign of aggression and persecution against Islam. A comparison with France is certainly instructive since the majority of anti-semitic attacks there are now carried out by young, radicalized Muslim thugs, and no longer by racist neo-nazis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent meeting with the Dalai Lama at her official residence in Berlin has caused a strong political backlash, not only from Beijing but also, more surprisingly, from Merkel’s left-wing SPD coalition partner as well as Germany’s business community. The Chinese, for their part, reacted immediately by canceling a bilateral human rights conference and calling off a number of senior political bilateral meetings, including one between German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi at the UN General Assembly in New York. After the diplomatic fall-out with Beijing it was Steinmeier--a deputy SPD party chairman who was also made vice chancellor two weeks ago--who attacked Merkel in rather harsh terms, accusing her of pursuing short-sighted "display-window policies" vis-à-vis China that, in essence, harmed Germany’s long-term strategic and economic engagement with Asia’s key power. Finally, Germany’s leading business federation, BDI, called for "a return to constructive dialogue" after "the irritations of recent weeks" between Berlin and Beijing. Several German top CEOs had expressed concern that the Dalai Lama visit would negatively affect their business with China.

Foreign minister Steinmeier also recently criticized Merkel’s Russia policy, arguing that the Chancellor was always "looking fearfully at how newspaper headlines back home" would view her relationship with President Putin, whom she has criticized repeatedly for the increasing violations of human rights and press freedom in Russia. To top it off, former SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made a very controversial statement in which he indirectly attributed Merkel’s "emotional," human rights-based foreign policy to her upbringing in former Communist East Germany. The rather hard-nosed "realpolitik" approach proposed by Messrs. Steinmeier and Schroeder was backed up this week by veteran left-wing SPD politician Erhard Eppler, who published an op-ed titled "Europe can’t afford to antagonize Russia and China" in Munich’s influential daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. In essence, 80-year old Eppler, who served as German Development Minister from 1968-1974 and has long retired from elected office, argues that Europe and Germany must prepare for the advent of a multi-polar world in which countries such as Russia and China are on the rise while America is in decline.

No one knows what will happen to the United States, to their economy, to the US dollar, to their foreign policy. The only certain thing is that they are no longer a moral world power. It is also certain that the rest of the world will not put up with what the neocons consider a "Pax Americana". The Americans will not rule the world. The globe will have several poles. One of them will be China, the other one Russia. Both will have that role regardless of whether they conform to our ideas of democracy or not. Unfortunately, one does not yet know for sure whether Europe will be a pole. If the Europeans manage to become on of the poles they will need to develop a thriving relationship with Russia and China. If the Europeans can’t get their act together, it will be even more important for the Germans to have close relations with these two countries.

The good news for Merkel so far is that, in general, more than 70 percent of the German population approve of her values-based foreign policy, which also puts a premium on environmental issues such as fighting global climate change. It remains to be seen whether the SPD party and Foreign Minister Steinmeier, a potential challenger to Merkel in the next federal elections to be held by the fall of 2009, can effectively attack the Chancellor’s foreign policy record, which until recently appeared to be unassailable and arguably her biggest trump card. However, it is certainly interesting to note that new opinion polls indicate Steinmeier’s political fortunes are on the rise. Since last week, for the first time ever, he’s now viewed as Germany’s "most important" politician; a position he wrestled from his boss Chancellor Merkel who dropped sharply in the ratings. Upcoming regional elections in several German state next spring and fall will provide a good indication of the relative strength of the conservative CDU/CSU parties and their current left-wing SPD "grand coalition" partner. In the meantime, Chancellor Merkel has vowed to hold true to her principled, value-based foreign policy. In a speech to the Bundestag on Wednesday she made her intentions very clear: "I will continue to chose the guests I meet and the places I visit based on what I see as being correctly in Germany’s interests."

Germany’s demographic time bomb is compounded by the fact that those children who are born increasingly grow up in impoverished families hampered by a lack of education, bad nutrition, and poor health.

According to advance excerpts from the Kinderreport 2007, which will be officially released by the well-known NGO Children’s Charity of Germany this Thursday, the number of children living on welfare in Germany now stands at about 2.5 million, more than twice the number three years ago. Today, 1 out of 6 children needs welfare support while back in 1965 it was only 1 out of 75 children. The rise in German child poverty, which has taken place against the backdrop of decades of economic expansion, is staggering.

In this context, it is above all children from poor, often Muslim, immigrant families whose parents frequently refuse to integrate into German society for religious or cultural reasons that are hardest hit. Young adults are also affected. In Berlin, for example, about 40 percent of young Turks under the age of 25 are now unemployed. A scary figure. According to Juergen Borchert, a social affairs judge who was one of the Kinderreport’s co-authors, the rate of child poverty has doubled every ten years during the past four decades. Borchert describes Germany’s demographic problems in truly dramatic terms:

“Germany is a colossus on the verge of collapse. Economically, this country is heading down the tubes fast because the children are no longer there.”

“Germany, the home of the Kindergarten, is now the worst developed country in which to raise children. This individualistic attitude goes back to the post-war period as society took a stand against the Nazi era. Family policy still suffers from the fact that Hitler adopted a specifically pro-family policy for the soldiers.”

“People simply are not used to dealing with children any more. They are seen as a nuisance.”

Children in Germany are fewer, poorer, increasingly Muslim, and increasingly less likely to find employment--they are likely to become more than just a nuisance.

Merkel says goodbye to the Dalai Lama after meeting at the chancellery.
(REUTERS/Markus Schreiber/Pool)

Even before the brutal crack-down in Burma turned the international spotlight on China’s cynical unwillingness to pressure the military junta in neighboring Rangoon, it was German Chancellor Merkel who--by receiving the exiled Tibetan leader Dalai Lama last Sunday in Berlin--decided to send a clear signal to Beijing emphasizing the importance of protecting fundamental human rights. Merkel was not only the first German chancellor to meet with the Dalai Lama. She also decided to receive him at her official residence for what was billed as "private and informal talks" about the Dalai Lama’s "work as the Buddhist Tibetan religious leader and his commitment to his Tibetan homeland." Ever since China forcibly annexed its Himalayan neighbor in 1950 and launched a tough campaign of repression against the native Buddhist Tibetans, Beijing has viewed any international red-carpet treatment for the "god king" as a threat to its political legitimacy and territorial integrity.

In the run-up to the Merkel-Dalai Lama talks, China had tried hard to prevent the sensitive meeting from happening. Last Friday, for instance, Beijing summoned the newly arrived German ambassador there to warn against the potential negative political and economic fall-out for relations between the two countries. Beijing also canceled several senior-level bilateral meetings during this week’s UN General Assembly opening session in New York for "scheduling reasons." According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, the meeting "grossly interferes with the internal affairs of China," "hurts the feelings of the Chinese people and seriously undermines China-Germany relations". While the Merkel government stressed the peaceful nature of the Dalai Lama’s international campaign to achieve autonomy--though not independence--for Tibet and confirmed its continued commitment to the "One China" policy, the German Chancellor nonetheless seized the opportunity to demonstrate that she is not willing to sacrifice her own political beliefs and principles on the altar of close political and economic ties with a rising China.

Merkel’s timing in sending a human rights message to Beijing was carefully chosen, coming just a few weeks after the chancellor’s trip to China (which was overshadowed by reports of PLA cyber attacks against German government computers), and less than a year before the start of the 2008 Olympics. Despite the blustering, Beijing knows too well that it would be counterproductive to make too big of a deal of the Dalai Lama visit, especially since it does not herald any major shift in Germany’s China policy. Just today, the ruling conservative CDU/CSU Bundestag group announced that Chancellor Merkel will give a major major foreign policy address on Asia at a conference in Berlin on October 26. She will leave for another Asia trip right after the speech, thus emphasizing the region’s growing political and economic importance.

Domestically, Angela Merkel got rave across-the-board political and media reviews for receiving the Dalai Lama, including from the opposition FDP and Green parties. Only SPD Chairman Kurt Beck, whose party is a member of the ruling Grand Coalition and who would surely like to take Merkel’s post after the next general elections, slightly criticized the chancellor, indicating that he would have chosen a more "neutral ground" for such an encounter. As an editorial in the left-leaning Berliner Zeitung put it:

"The chancellor's resolve is to be welcomed because a policy of cozying up to Beijing, such as that pursued by (former Chancellor) Gerhard Schroeder, is of no use to anyone and only covers up existing conflicts. The small disturbance will not undermine bilateral relations: The Chinese are reliable and sensible enough to be able to distinguish between tactics and strategy. They wanted--as did Merkel--to send out a signal, and they have done so. Neither side has any interest in further turbulence."

"The real tests lie ahead. The Olympic Games are taking place in Beijing next year and China will soon be the world’s biggest export nation. Beijing’s global influence is growing --and with it the temptation for other countries to not look quite so closely at the human rights situation there. Merkel is thus to be applauded for continuing to defy, in all friendliness, Germany’s biggest partner in Asia."

During the past two weeks or so, Germany seemed to be gripped by a certain "Dalai Lamania" as the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a non-stop political and media tour across the country. For Chancellor Merkel, the meeting in Berlin was also an important opportunity to reach out to centrist voters by once again stressing her personal commitment to the protection of human rights (remember her frank criticism of Russian President Putin in that regard). Traditionally, it had been the SPD party and the Greens who were widely seen as the champions of "soft" issues such as human rights; the tenure of former chancellor and Putin buddy Gerhard Schroeder notwithstanding. Gearing up for the next general elections to be held by the fall of 2009, Merkel is smartly expanding her party’s appeal to the rapidly growing number of swing voters in Germany. One final observation: While the Dalai Lama’s campaign to improve the human rights situation in Tibet in the face of Chinese repression is certainly a worthy cause, it was astonishing to see how otherwise strictly secular politicians from the SPD, Green, FDP, and Left party (and even some CDU folks) bowed down before the "god king," referring to him as "His Holiness." It should be pointed out that these are the same people who generally refuse to address Germany’s top Catholic and Protestant leaders Karl Cardinal Lehmann or Bishop Wolfgang Huber with their appropriate titles, opting instead for a more informal, i.e. less respectful, "Herr Lehmann" or "Herr Huber."

The recently foiled terror attack in Germany--involving several Turkish extremists and, very disturbingly, two German converts--has triggered another acrimonious political debate about how far the government can go to fight terrorism and protect the homeland. For example, does the (conservative) German defense minister have the authority to order the downing of a hijacked civil airliner even if it means the killing of innocent passengers on board? (Back in March 2006, when this issue first erupted following a Constitutional Court ruling prohibiting such shoot-downs, I wrote a DAILY STANDARD piece about the dangers of "Flying Blind in the Post-9/11 World.") And what of those who spend their summers at terrorist training camps in Pakistan learning Bomb Making 101 (like several of the recently detained terrorists did): should German laws be changed so that anyone who attends these training camps can be charged with membership in a terrorist organization? Is it necessary to prove that these folks had the premeditated intention to use their new skills to commit terrorist attacks in the future? Also, should German security agencies have the authority to install spyware on the computers of suspected terrorists to track their online movements? Finally, at a more abstract level, how real is the threat of nuclear terrorism and the use of a "dirty bomb"?

Much of the current controversy centers on the long-standing left/right divide over the appropriate balance between security and civil liberties, a battle that is also being waged here in the United States. In the German context, however, calibrating the government’s response is made particularly difficult by the country’s long shadow of history. Since the end of the Nazi dictatorship, successive generations of German political leaders, as well as large segments of the general population, have consistently put a premium on the far-reaching protection of civil liberties by agreeing to strictly limit the state’s domestic security and surveillance competencies. For sure, during the Red Army Faction’s left-wing terrorist campaign against top-level government and business officials back in the 1970s, West Germany passed expansive anti-terrorism legislation, most of which still remains in force today. Yet while these new police and security measures helped defeat the RAF group’s old-style terrorist tactics, they are hardly a match for today’s breed of doomsday Islamists willing to use any weapon--including nuclear, biological, and chemical devices--to cause wanton mass destruction.

Yesterday, at a special homeland security debate convened in the German Bundestag, the profound political and ideological divisions over the appropriate approach to fight terrorism were on full display. While formally part of Chancellor Merkel’s Grand-Coalition government, several senior politicians from the ruling left-wing SPD party used the parliamentary session to launch harsh attacks on conservative CDU interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble (who will discuss his anti-terrorism approach here in DC next week) and Franz-Josef Jung, his colleague in charge of the defense ministry. The two were accused of deliberately spreading panic and fear of terrorism among the population for political gain. Deputy SPD Bundestag leader Fritz Rudolf Koerper (until 2005 deputy German interior minister in the previous Red-Green Schroeder government) even ridiculed Schaeuble as "the Nostradamus of our times." It was Schaeuble who, just a few days earlier, had caused an uproar in Germany when he said that an attack using "nuclear material" was no longer a question of "if" but "when." In response to these unprecedented and public intra-coalition attacks, CDU/CSU Bundestag majority leader Volker Kauder decided to leave the chamber in protest; an indication of how sour relations between the Grand Coalition partners have turned.

Merkel inspects PLA troops outside the Great Hall of
the People in Beijing August 27, 2007. (REUTERS/Jason Lee)

The current cover story of Germany’s weekly magazine Der Spiegel, titled "The Yellow Spies: How China Spies Out German Technology," has triggered a big political debate in Berlin about how to manage the country’s political and economic relations with Beijing. According to undisclosed sources cited by Der Spiegel, German domestic security agencies believe that Chinese hackers linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) installed Trojan spy programs camouflaged as Word and PowerPoint documents on several computers at the Federal Chancellery, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Economics and Technology, as well as the Federal Ministry for Education and Research.

In its first reaction, the Chinese Embassy in Berlin issued a statement rejecting the allegations, calling the Spiegel report "irresponsible speculation based on no factual evidence." The German Interior Ministry, for its part, pointed out that cyber attacks against government computers are a constant problem, but that no damage had been caused by them so far. Politicians from across Germany’s political spectrum strongly condemned the Chinese hacker attacks and urged the Merkel government to make sure that such attacks would not happen again. The opposition pro-market FDP party also wants to raise the issue in the Bundestag to determine whether the IT security standards of the German government are really up to date.

The timing of the story’s publication was certainly designed to ensure maximum impact, as it came on the eve of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s on-going week-long Asia tour, which would lead her first to China and then to Japan. While Merkel declined to discuss the Chinese hacker allegations in public, she vowed to raise the issue of intellectual property protection during her talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao. A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry declared that Beijing "has always been against and strictly opposes the criminal action of hacking and harming computer systems," adding that China and other countries have established good cooperation mechanisms to strike against hacking and that Beijing "is willing to strengthen cooperation with Germany on the issue." Other top agenda items include efforts to fight global climate change, recent Chinese product safety issues, and, last but not least, human rights concerns, particularly in connection with Darfur and China’s close energy ties to the Sudanese government in Khartoum.

It remains to be seen what impact the recent cyber attacks revelations will have on German perceptions of China. For a long time, European countries, especially strong trading powers such as Germany, have viewed China above all as an economic opportunity, and not as a military or geostrategic competitor. The reverse has generally been true for the United States, where China is viewed both as an economic threat (by protectionist-minded Democrats) and as a strategic military threat (primarily by Republican security hawks in the current administration and on Capitol Hill). China, of course, is not the only problem. The head of the domestic intelligence agency of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s biggest state, just warned that Iran and Russia are trying hard to steal sensitive commercial/dual use technologies from German companies.

Spiegel reports that Chinese hackers have targeted computer networks operated by the German government. "German security officials managed to stop the theft of 160 gigabytes of data which were in the process of being siphoned off German government computers," the magazine reports. And Chancellor Merkel, who is currently in China, apparently raised the issue with Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was all smiles after meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Monday, praising relations between the two countries as open and constructive.

But her visit has been marred by a report in SPIEGEL that a large number of computers in the German chancellery as well as the foreign, economy and research ministries had been infected with Chinese spy software. Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, discovered the hacking operation in May, the magazine reported in its new edition, published Monday.

The Chinese government has vehemently denied the report, with the Chinese Embassy in Berlin describing the accusation of state-controlled hacking as "irresponsible speculation without a shred of evidence."

But Prime Minister Wen Jiabao assured Merkel that measures would be taken to "rule out hacking attacks."

Earlier this year, military officials at the Naval Network Warfare Command told reporters that Chinese hackers "will exploit anything and everything" and that the nature of the attacks makes it "hard to believe it’s not government-driven.” It seems German officials have come to the same conclusion.

On Tuesday this week, Chancellor Merkel’s cabinet voted to extend for another year what has arguably been Germany’s most controversial military operation since the end of WWII, namely the 2006 deployment of Bundeswehr naval forces off the Lebanese coast to interdict arms shipments to Hezbollah forces as part of the UNIFIL mission. In October 2006, the German contingent, which currently consists of about 1,000 soldiers and eight ships, took the lead in UNIFIL’s maritime mission, which counts a total of 2,000 forces and is also supported by Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria.

Chancellor Merkel visited UNIFIL military personnel
aboard the Brandenburg earlier this year.

In August last year, UN Security Council resolution 1701 had authorized up to 15,000 UN peacekeepers (about 13,000 troops were subsequently deployed) to help keep the shaky ceasefire in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon War--the bloody, destructive, and ultimately inconclusive 34-day proxy war between Israeli forces and Hezbollah.

In a piece for THE DAILY STANDARD published almost exactly a year ago, titled "Germany Goes to the Middle East," I analyzed why the Bundeswehr’s naval deployment in Lebanon proved to be so divisive for Chancellor Merkel's Grand Coalition government, the three opposition parties, and German public opinion:

Ironically, both supporters and opponents of Germany's military engagement in Lebanon have made veiled references to the Holocaust in support of their positions. Those in favor of sending troops argue that Germany has a moral obligation to do everything in its power to help guarantee the existence of the Jewish state. […]

In contrast, Germans opposed to sending soldiers to police the ceasefire argue that this would have the potential of setting Bundeswehr against Israeli soldiers. […]

And still others argue that precisely because of Germany's pro-Israel stance, it cannot be part of a neutral U.N. force in Lebanon which, by definition, would have to respond equally to ceasefire violations by either party.

On Tuesday, the German government portrayed the Lebanese naval mission as a success story. According to German Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung, Bundeswehr forces checked more than 8,500 ships via radio, 35 of which were subsequently searched by the Lebanese in their ports. According to official statistics, none of these searches yielded any weapons. It should be noted that no ship was ever searched by force.

Under German law, the Lebanon mission’s 12-month extension (like all Bundeswehr deployments abroad for that matter) has to be approved by the Bundestag in a parliamentary vote, which is now scheduled for mid-September. It is widely expected that the governing CDU/CSU-SPD Grand Coalition parties and the Greens will provide overwhelming support for the naval operation. In contrast, the pacifist-populist post-Communist Left Party and parts of the pro-market Free Democratic Party (FDP) are still adamantly opposed to the Bundeswehr mission. The Left Party opposes any Bundeswehr mission abroad and wants to strictly limit the military to Germany’s territorial defense. The FDP is particularly concerned about the potential for German-Israeli military clashes and demands more assurances from Chancellor Merkel’s government that those issues have been addressed.

In fact, in October last year, several incidents involving German UNIFIL ships/helicopters and Israeli fighters took place off the Lebanese coast. While the Israeli government denied reports that its jets had fired two shots at an unarmed German reconnaissance vessel, Prime Minister Olmert had a 40-minute conference call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel a few days later to apologize for the unspecified incident and to assure her government that these things would not happen again.

From Der Spiegel: "Die Bushkrieger" 8/2002
Illustration: Jean Pierre Kunkel.

When it comes to the Bush administrations’s war on terror and the U.S. military intervention in Iraq, the German weekly Der Spiegel has certainly come a long way. Back in February 2002, the Hamburg-based center-left magazine published the (in)famous cover story "The Bush Warriors: America’s Campaign Against Evil," which featured a controversial drawing of President Bush dressed up as Rambo and flanked by Colin Powell as Batman, Donald Rumsfeld as Conan the Warrior, Dick Cheney as the Terminator, and Condoleezza Rice as Xena, the Warrior Princess. In essence, the article argued that the United States, in response to the 9/11 attacks, had embarked on a world-wide military crusade led by a bible-wielding, trigger happy Rambo in the Oval Office.

From a purely artistic point of view, the pop-art style piece by French-born artist Jean Pierre Kunkel was certainly well done. From a political perspective, however, it is, in retrospect, quite striking that less than six months after the 9/11 attacks (and well before the 2003 Iraq war) one of Europe’s most influential magazines already saw America and Europe on diverging paths in the fight against Islamic terrorism, arguably the defining challenge of our times. Over the past few years, as the transatlantic rift widened due to fundamental differences over hot button issues ranging from climate change to Guantanamo, Der Spiegel has, in general, been very critical of the Bush administration’s foreign and domestic policies.

Against this backdrop, I had my own "O’Hanlon-Pollack moment" when learning that this week’s cover story of Der Spiegel-- titled "Baghdad Babylon: SPIEGEL-Reporter with U.S. Soldiers in the Iraq War," provided an unexpectedly upbeat assessment of the current surge strategy in Iraq. For three weeks in July, Der Spiegel reporter Ullrich Fichtner and his photographer traveled across Iraq under the auspices of the U.S. military to get a first-hand impression of the situation on the ground. Online, the 15-page in-depth Iraq trip article titled "The Hellish Peace" is only available to Spiegel subscribers:

During an online-chat yesterday about his recent trip to Iraq, Ullrich Fichtner provided the following assessments:

"I think that the current troop surge provides a real opportunity for progress that could make a difference [in Iraq]." […]"One can say that the entire North, the Kurdish areas, but also the rural areas around Baghdad are no longer war zones."

At the same time, however, Fichtner also described how certain areas of Baghdad have become completely abandoned ghost towns. In still other Baghdad neighborhoods, "everyone is fighting against everyone." Overall, Fichtner paints a very nuanced picture of the complex situation in Iraq. For sure, plenty of political and military problems remain. But there is also reason for optimism.

Many Spiegel chat users were particularly interested in the morale of U.S. troops in Iraq. Here, Fichtner provided quite a positive account, arguing that many of the American soldiers "were in a surprisingly good mood":

"In fact, my biggest impression was that almost every third [U.S. soldier] had at one point been stationed in Germany. And I had to engage in a lot of conversations about bratwurst, beer, Oktoberfest, and Black Forest cherry cake."

Fichtner also believes that the extent of conflict between Shiites and Sunnis is overestimated by the outside world--that real reconciliation across religious lines is still a distinct possibility:

"It is also a race against the clock. As long as the sectarian murders continue, and there are still about 600 such executions every month, there is no room for talks. But these executions are a Baghdad-specific problem. In the rest of the country [Shiite and Sunni] groups lead a life of peaceful coexistence." […]

Finally, Ullrich Fichtner expressed his hope that people around the world will not be blinded by new photos of bombings; rather they should recognize "that a successful future for Iraq is possible."

It is still too early to say what impact, if any, the Spiegel cover story will have on the German public’s perception of the Bush administration (the president’s approval ratings there have long been in the single digits) or of the U.S. intervention in Iraq. However, if things in Iraq are beginning to move in the right direction, and if General Petraeus’s update report in September is positive as well, European governments could have more domestic political leeway to provide additional political, economic, and police/military training support for Iraq’s stabilization and reconstruction. For far too long, European public opinion has viewed the Iraq war as a lost-cause--a quagmire caused by an unwarranted unilateral U.S. military invasion--that is now essentially Bush’s problem to solve. In the coming months we will see whether improving conditions on the ground in Iraq can also improve public perceptions outside of Iraq, not only in Europe but also in the United States.

Is Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama, the self-declared "new face" of American politics, nothing but a unilateralist, trigger happy, national security hard-liner--the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing? That’s probably the reaction that German political observers (as well as other Europeans for that matter) had when learning about the details of Senator Obama’s "comprehensive strategy to fight global terrorism, which he rolled out in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington last Tuesday.

The most controversial element of Obama’s speech, dubbed "The War We Need To Win," is his threat to take America’s military fight against Islamic terrorists directly to Pakistan: "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will." Obama’s tough talk about a possible U.S. military intervention in what is arguably the world’s most dangerous (nuclear) hot spot has not only triggered sharp rebukes by his Democratic rivals (except Hillary), but has raised red flags in Germany as well.

In this context, it is important to emphasize that Obama’s "Let’s-Invade-Pakistan" gospel traveled across the Atlantic just days after the Bush administration unveiled plans to sell tens of billions of advanced weapons systems to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other pro-Western Gulf states in an effort to counter the influence of Iran, Syria, al Qaeda and Hezbollah. Just for the record, all of Germany’s political parties as well as the country’s leading newspaper commentators have strongly condemned the arms deal, which is expected to face tough scrutiny in a Democratic Congress.

This past Friday, Germany’s highly-respected conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published an editorial page commentary--euphemistically titled "Also robust"--taking issue with the national security advice dispensed by the first-term junior senator from Illinois.

Whoever takes Obama’s remark seriously will soon begin to start brooding, especially because Pakistan and its president are indispensable to wear down the terrorists. For sure, Musharraf has made mistakes and various maneuverings, but to pull the domestic political rug out from under him would further deteriorate the situation. The world that is now keenly looking forward to the end of President Bush’s administration will find out that-- if a Democrat succeeds him--there are certain continuities across U.S. party lines. Unilateralism is not Bush’s invention.

In Germany, a country where Bush’s personal approval ratings have long been in the single digits and where the Democrats are widely seen as the forces of good (back in 2004, polls indicated a German preference for John Kerry by a margin of 85-90 percent), a more differentiated assessment of U.S. politics is certainly welcome news. And so Obama's blunt attempt to re-gain vital national security ground after losing out to Hillary Clinton in the recent Democratic debate has backfired in the States and abroad. As another Democratic candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden, said at a National Press Club luncheon last Wednesday:

"The way to deal with it is not to announce it, but to do it."

Bulgarian medics convicted of infecting Libyan children with
HIV arrive at Sofia airport on Tuesday. (Nikolay Doychinovn/Reuters TV)

During his recent presidential campaign, Nicolas Sarkozy promised to be the candidate of change, someone who was committed to breaking up France’s sclerotic political system and over-regulated economy. In foreign policy, too, Sarkozy vowed to make France "a shining city upon a hill," a beacon of hope and a staunch defender of freedom, democracy, and human rights around the world. In this context, it seemed to be both smart politics and good morals when the media savvy Sarkozy (who never seems to miss an opportunity to make a splash) appointed Socialist politician Bernard Kouchner, the internationally respected co-founder of French humanitarian NGO "Doctors Without Borders," as his new foreign minister in May. However, barely two months into his five-year term, it appears that President Sarkozy is personally committed to a foreign policy agenda primarily driven by narrowly-defined French national interests, thus leaving his more idealistic foreign minister in the dust.

On Wednesday last week, Sarkozy visited with Libyan homme fort (even the French employ this euphemistic code-word for dictator) Col. Moammar Gadhafi and signed various, wide-ranging bilateral cooperation agreements in critical areas such as defense, health, the fight against terrorism, and civilian nuclear power. In fact, Sarkozy’s plane landed in Tripoli less than 24 hours after his wife Cecilia had left the Libyan capital together with six Bulgarian medical workers who were released from a Libyan prison in what turned out to be major photo-op for France’s telegenic first lady.

Under the terms of the Franco-Libyan nuclear deal, Sarkozy has agreed to provide Col. Gadhafi with an atomic reactor to be used for powering a desalination plant. In return, Libya will provide France’s nuclear power giant Areva with much-needed uranium. It comes very handy that Col. Gadhafi has about 1,600 tons of uranium left over from his country’s clandestine nuclear weapons program abandoned in 2004. Sarkozy’s nuclear deal with Col. Gadhafi--for many years a key sponsor of international terrorism--was criticized both in France and abroad. France’s anti-nuclear coalition, "Sortir du Nucleaire," accused Sarkozy of handing over nuclear technology to Libya in exchange for the nurses. "Civilian and military nuclear are inseparable," the French NGO said in a statement. "Delivering ‘civilian’ nuclear energy to Libya would amount to helping the country, sooner or later, to acquire nuclear weapons."

Thomas Enders (left) and Louis Gallois. (DPA)

As we predicted back in May, the power struggle between Paris and Berlin over the restructuring at aerospace and defense company EADS has become a first crucial test of the Franco-German relationship in the wake of Nicolas Sarkozy’s election. In essence, the fight over control at EADS is about securing jobs, preserving key technological capabilities, and national prestige.

On Monday last week, following months of political wrangling, Sarkozy and Merkel met at the headquarters of Airbus (Boeing’s arch rival is 100 percent controlled by EADS) in Toulouse to announce a grand bargain designed to calm the waters, streamline EADS’s cumbersome management structure, and allow the company to go back to business. Starting October 1, Frenchman Louis Gallois, now the Co-CEO of EADS as well as the CEO of Airbus, will become the sole chief executive of EADS. His current German counterpart, Tom Enders, will take over as CEO of Airbus, by far the biggest and most important EADS division. At the same time, Ruediger Grube, a top German executive at key EADS shareholder DaimlerChrysler, will take over as the sole EADS supervisory board chairman (a position that is now shared with a Frenchman).

Merkel coolly described the Franco-German compromise--which needs to be approved at an EADS shareholders meeting later this year--as "balanced, fair and economically sensible." The first reaction of other German political leaders, newspaper commentators, and industry analysts was to hail the deal as a welcome step towards strengthening the position of Germany in EADS. As one commentator put it, Tom Enders and Ruediger Grube can now “squeeze” EADS CEO Gallois, who will be sandwiched between the two German executives. In France, the EADS deal was also seen as welcome news, particularly because Louis Gallois will take over as the sole CEO of EADS. Just a week earlier, alarm bells had gone off in Paris amid growing speculation that DaimlerChrysler had managed to secure the EADS CEO post for Tom Enders. Such an outcome would have been the worst case scenario for Sarkozy, whose government directly controls 15 percent of EADS and which is still eager to sideline Tom Enders because of the German manager’s outspoken opposition to any political interference by Paris in the management affairs of EADS.

In principle, the fact that both the French and the German side welcomed the Toulouse deal could be seen as proof that a fair and balanced EADS compromise has finally been found. However, as so often is the case, the devil is in the details. Late last week, the Financial Times Deutschland reported that Louis Gallois will be able to nominate the four new independent members of the EADS supervisory board "in cooperation with" chairman Ruediger Grube. So far, this important element of the Toulouse deal had not been made public. Initially, the addition of outside directors was seen as another step towards making EADS a more "normal" company. However, in a "normal" company, the German chairman Ruediger Grube alone would have the privilege of nominating his fellow board members.

German EADS insiders have, in off-the-record interviews, expressed concern that it is future Airbus CEO Tom Enders, rather than Louis Gallois, who will be weakened by the new management structure. First off, Enders was demoted from being the Co-CEO of EADS to the position of CEO of the company’s Airbus subsidiary. Second, as head of Airbus, Enders (who speaks no French) will have to move to Toulouse, where he will have to deal with Fabrice Brégier, the current Airbus COO and a close confidant of Louis Gallois, and restive trade unions. Finally, Enders joins Airbus at a time when the European plane maker is in need of a serious turnaround, but he has virtually no experience in commercial aviation.

Merkel holds a copy of the Turkish daily Hurriyet.

Last Thursday in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel hosted the country’s second "Integration Summit," which saw representatives attend from various immigrant associations representing the more than 7 million foreigners currently living in Germany. But several of the major groups representing Germany's 2.6 million-strong Turkish community decided to boycott the high-level gathering. Further, they threatened to no longer participate in such meetings unless the German government repealed new, more restrictive immigration reform legislation. Chancellor Merkel was quick to condemn the Turkish boycott and strongly rejected any attempt to coerce the German government into revoking the bill. At the Summit, she also promised to provide €750 million ($1.1 billion) in new funding for various integration measures, including German language and culture courses and sports activities for youth.

Commentators from Germany’s leading newspapers were divided over whether the Turkish groups were justified in boycotting the Integration Summit or whether this was just further evidence that Germany's Turkish community has no real interest in integration.

From the Turkish perspective, the most controversial aspect of Germany’s immigration reform package--which was passed by both houses of parliament earlier this year but has yet to be signed into law by the German President--concerns new provisions restricting the ability of foreigners to have their foreign-born spouses move to Germany permanently.

First, foreigners in Germany will have to wait until their spouses are at least 18 years old before they can bring them into the country. Second, all spouses will be required to demonstrate basic German language skills before they are allowed to move to Germany. In particular, these two new provisions attempt to clamp down on a very disturbing practice that has prevented the successful integration of Germany’s growing Muslim community for far too long. In Germany (like in other European countries) Muslim immigrants have “imported” their young brides--who generally come from rural areas, have low levels of education, speak no German, and are sometimes only 15 or 16 years old--through arranged marriages. In this context, German authorities are also increasingly concerned about forced marriages involving young women and girls from Turkey and other Muslim countries being married against their will to foreigners in Germany. Obviously, the line between “arranged marriages” and “forced marriages” can be very blurry.

In her bestselling 2005 book Die Fremde Braut (The Strange Bride), Turkish-German sociologist and women’s rights activist Necla Kelet provided a powerful account of the plight of young Turkish women sent to Germany to marry men they've never met before and to live in a country where they do not speak the language. Kelet’s book and similar publications by other Turkish-German authors like Seyran Ates and Serap Cileli are based on interviews, sociological studies, as well as partly on autobiographical material. For obvious reasons, though, it is very difficult to obtain and assess the true extent of the problem as Turkish women in Germany are often too afraid to speak out and seek legal protection in response to abuse.

But Kelet’s book, in particular, has triggered a barrage of criticism. Several Turkish-German academics and journalists have accused her of overstating the extent of forced marriages by taking isolated incidents out of context and making generalized statements about the Turkish population in Germany at large. The influential Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, which has a circulation of more than 500,000 in Germany alone, accused the authors of insulting Turkish women, making the Turkish community look bad, and reconfirming German prejudices against Turks by making generalizations. But Germany’s respected conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, responded that Hurriyet’s actions amounted to a smear campaign.

With Germany's G8 Summit and rotating EU presidency over, the controversial Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan has returned to the top of the political agenda in Berlin. On Tuesday this week, Germany's highest court rejected a suit filed by the populist, post-Communist Left party, which claimed that the recent deployment of six Tornado reconnaissance aircraft to Southern Afghanistan to support the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had gone beyond NATO's initial raison d'être as a collective defensive organization and was therefore a violation of the German constitution.

The German Tornado aircraft will carry cameras
but no bombs or missiles.

As the eight judges from the Constitutional Court's Second Senate put it, "the NATO-led ISAF mission in Afghanistan serves the security of the Euro-Atlantic area" and is therefore covered by the North Atlantic Treaty that then-West Germany ratified in 1955. In particular, the Court clearly rejected the plaintiffs' absurd argument that defensive NATO military operations should be strictly limited to the territory of NATO members only. According to the Left party's twisted logic, NATO should apparently adopt an approach of "let's fight them here so we don't have to fight them there." Other Left party politicians, including, possibly, some far-left members from the governing SPD party, seem to think that if they pull troops out of Afghanistan, terrorists will simply leave Germany alone.

While the Constitutional Court's ruling in support of the Tornado deployment was widely expected in Berlin's political circles, it is worth emphasizing that the eight judges established a direct causal link between security conditions on the ground in Afghanistan and the continuing terror threat to the "security of the Euro-Atlantic area". At the same time, however, one should not forget that more than 60 percent of the German public no longer supports the Bundeswehr's Afghanistan engagement. Similar public opinion challenges are faced by virtually all other NATO member governments that have troops deployed there, ranging from Canada to Italy and the Netherlands. Unfortunately, recent casualties among Afghan civilians in connection with offensive NATO operations have added to the growing Western choir demanding an exit strategy from Afghanistan, including even a precipitous troop withdrawal.

While NATO forces must make every effort to avoid civilian Afghan casualties--this is not only a moral but also a political-military imperative of any counterinsurgency operations aimed at separating the terrorists from their local support base--one should not forget what Afghanistan looked like before the US-led NATO intervention, that pre-9/11 Afghanistan proved to be a serious threat to NATO member countries. If NATO withdraws from Afghanistan now, leaving a resurgent Taliban and a weak central government, there's little reason to hope for a different result the second time around.

With the G8 Summit in Germany just days away, the world’s eight leading industrialized countries have so far failed to come to an agreement on what was supposed to be Chancellor Merkel’s historic breakthrough on the international stage: forging, for the first time, a consensus that climate change is a real problem that requires concrete, binding, and long-term CO2-emission reduction targets.

Merkel and Pelosi address journalists at the ‘Skylobby’ of
the Chancellory in Berlin, where they met for talks about
climate change ahead of the G8 summit.

But Merkel’s push to make the G8 nations limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and to support a global emissions trading regime has run into firm opposition from the Bush administration, which favors non-binding arrangements that put a premium on innovative technologies and nuclear power. The latter is strongly opposed by Merkel’s left-wing SPD coalition partner, which wants to phase out all remaining German nuclear power plants by 2021. According to German newspaper reports, Washington sent a note to Berlin last week accusing the Merkel government of ignoring "serious, fundamental concerns" here in the United States about the draft G8 climate change communiqué. A commentator for Germany’s centrist weekly Die Zeit already warned of the potential for a "climate war" among the G8 nations, which could lead to the first major clash in the Summit’s 30-year history.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Chancellor Merkel in Berlin "to personally congratulate her, and thank her, for her leadership" on the issue of addressing international climate change. Speaking at the first stop of her week-long trip to Europe, Pelosi strongly urged Bush to help reach a climate change compromise. "This trip for us began in Greenland, where we saw first-hand evidence that climate change is a reality. There is just no denying it."

Yesterday, President Bush made a surprise move and unveiled his own proposal for a "A New International Climate Change Framework", urging 15 of the world’s major CO2 emitters (the G8 plus key emerging market players such as China and India that are exempt from the current Kyoto Protocol and which is set to expire in 2012) to meet this fall "to develop a long-term global goal to reduce greenhouse gasses" in an effort to address climate change "in a way that enhances energy security and promotes economic growth." According to the Bush plan, each country would be able to decide on its own how to meet the emissions goal.

Merkel cautiously welcomed Bush’s new initiative, noting that she saw "movement on the issue" and that Bush had recognized that "climate change is man-made and cannot be ignored." German media, however, reacted with some skepticism. Munich’s left-of-center daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung, for instance, views Bush’s "vicious proposal" as a "poison pill" designed to kill both the G8 Summit and the UN Climate Change Conference in Indonesia later this year. After all, in proposing his own alternative, post-Kyoto framework involving only the world’s 15 major CO2 emitters, President Bush clearly wants to deal with climate change outside of the often unwieldy 192-nation UN framework. However, Dr. Bernd Pfaffenbach, Germany’s G8 sherpa, already made it clear that UN-involvement in any post-Kyoto climate change regime was "non-negotiable." Without mentioning Bush’s latest proposal, he explained that "This is a red line that the Chancellor would never cross."

It remains to be seen what the G8 Summit endgame will look like. In Germany, as in the rest of Europe, there are high hopes that the Summit will mark a historic breakthrough in the fight against climate change. But these hyped expectations may turn out to be completely unfounded. Conservative analysts such as Torsten Krauel, the Washington correspondent for Die Welt, are already beginning to criticize Merkel for her handling of the G8 Summit preparations. According to Krauel, Merkel has overplayed her hand vis-à-vis President Bush, who--while trying to convince his conservative Republican base to accept a controversial immigration deal--has little political capital left to make significant concessions on climate change. The Kyoto protocol, after all, is still seen by many Americans as an "unfair treaty" which gives economic competitors such as China and India a free ride. As Krauel put it, "For the first time, Merkel has lost the feeling for the right measure in foreign policy."

Last Saturday, three members of the German armed forces and seven local Afghans were killed by a Taliban suicide bomber at a bazaar in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. The attack, which also severely wounded several other German soldiers and scores of Afghan civilians, brought the number of total German losses in that country to 24.

German troops in Afghanistan. Courtesy of AFP/Shah Maria.

The bombing also shattered the long-standing misconception, both in the German public and among key NATO allies, that Bundeswehr troops in the North are primarily engaged in safe reconstruction work while American, Canadian, and British forces hunt Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in the South.

This division of labor is, in fact, a fiction. Berlin has already dispatched Germany’s secretive KSK special forces to support NATO combat missions in the South on more than 70 occasions. Also, security conditions in the North, like elsewhere in the country, have deteriorated in recent months. The situation on the ground is so dire that President Bush even felt compelled to invite NATO secretary-general Jaap De Hoop Scheffer to his Crawford ranch last weekend, vowing to "work with our NATO allies to convince them that they must share more of the burden and must all share the risks in meeting our goal."

Back in Germany, conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel was quick to condemn the attacks as "perfidious murder that fills us all with disgust" and reiterated the international community’s commitment "to continue helping the people of Afghanistan build a good future for their country." Commentators from Germany’s most influential newspapers also expressed strong support for the continuation of the Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan, arguing that a precipitous withdrawal could have terrible consequences. According to the center-right mass-circulation tabloid Bild:

Terrible though these deaths are, it would be short-sighted and dangerous to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan because of this. For one thing, Germany can’t leave the war on terror up to other nations and confine its own role to that of a morally superior preacher. Second, we can only depend on the support of our alliance partners if we too contribute to the fight against terror. A withdrawal of the German army would be a triumph for the Taliban. Worse: It would render the sacrifice brought by these soldiers and the others pointless.

Even before Saturday’s deadly bombing, polls indicated that almost 50 percent of the German population was in favor of pulling Bundeswehr troops out of Afghanistan. Eager to ride the wave of public opinion, MPs from the populist Left Party as well as leftist members of the SPD party--which is part of Merkel’s "Grand Coalition"--have now seized on the Kunduz attacks to call for a withdrawal of all German forces stationed there since 2001.

Oskar Lafontaine, the charismatic Left Party leader in the Bundestag, even charged that the German military was "indirectly involved in terrorist actions" because of the recent deployment of eight Tornado reconnaissance fighters in support of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. Speaking on Sabine Christiansen, Germany’s most popular TV talk show, Lafontaine first defined terrorism as the unlawful use of force in pursuit of political objectives before drawing a direct comparison between Iraq and Afghanistan: "Under this definition, Bush, Blair, and others are terrorists because they have used force unlawfully on a large scale in Iraq and hundreds of thousands have died." The same was true of Afghanistan, the rhetorically brilliant Lafontaine added. Unfortunately, Germany’s embattled conservative defense minister Franz-Josef Jung was not able to effectively counter Lafontaine’s polemic during the televised panel discussion. And in an interview with Bild, Ottmar Schreiner, a left wing Bundestag SPD MP, made it clear that his doubts about the purpose of the mission had grown, and that he sees "no sustainable future prospects in the civilian area that would justify further military intervention." Therefore, he said, "the entire mission needs to be reviewed."

Right now, three separate Bundestag mandates--all of which need to be renewed by the parliament on a yearly basis--govern the rules of Germany’s military engagement in Afghanistan. The first mandate, passed in response to the 9/11 attacks, is part of the American-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and covers select German land, air, and naval forces operating in the region. Politically, this mandate--set to expire in mid-November--is the most controversial, as it involves hunting down terrorists, interdicting ships, and other offensive operations. The second and third mandate--both set to expire in mid-October--are part of the UN-sponsored, NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) and concern the bulk of the more than 3,000 German ground troops operating in northern Afghanistan as well as the Tornado reconnaissance aircraft in the South. The Tornado mandate, first passed in March 2007, already proved to be very divisive as more than 60 left-wing SPD members defected and voted against the fighter deployment while their party leadership, along with the rest of the CDU/CSU MPs from the "Grand Coalition," voted in favor.

For the time being, a majority of Bundestag MPs--that is, virtually all conservative CDU/CSU lawmakers, many moderate SPD members, plus a few sensible Greens--still support the Afghanistan mission and are therefore likely to renew both the OEF and ISAF mandates this fall. However, there is a risk that mounting NATO casualties and the perception that no progress is being made in Afghanistan could turn public opinion in Germany--as well as other key allies such as Canada and France--decisively against the mission there. In that sense, Iraq and Afghanistan are indeed beginning to share some similarities.

President Bush gives German Chancellor Angela
Merkel a back rub at last year's summit.

From June 6-8, Germany will be hosting the 2007 G8 Summit at Heiligendamm, the country’s oldest seaside resort, which is located on the Baltic Sea shore. Apart from the usual rich country suspects, German Chancellor Merkel has also invited the leaders of five major emerging economies--Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa--as well as five African nations--Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Algeria, Senegal, and Ghana--to discuss a wide range of global economic and developmental challenges under the Leitmotif “Growth and Responsibility.” In contrast, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz--another G8 regular--will probably need to cancel his participation in the coming days.

For the time being, however, German authorities are primarily concerned about how to deal with those who have not been invited to the G8 Summit, namely the 100,000 anti-globalization protesters they expect to face off against some 16,000 police, 1,100 soldiers, and nine naval vessels the government in Berlin plans to deploy. A few days ago, 900 interior ministry agents already launched dawn raids against suspected left-wing extremists in 40 apartments across Germany, netting 21 suspects who were charged with planning violent attacks against the G8 Summit.

At the same time, it is also becoming clear that right-wing extremists are preparing to stage their own, albeit smaller, G8 protests, drawing on anti-capitalist sentiment that's much the same to that motivating their left-wing comrades. According to Der Spiegel,

Intelligence officers fear that by using obvious anti-capitalist rhetoric the [extreme right-wing party] NPD could succeed in scoring points in the disadvantaged regions of the former East Germany. In one of their anti-G8 flyers, the extreme right-wingers fulminate in classic leftist mode against “competition with low-wage countries, which leaves infrastructure deserts and mass unemployment in its wake.” And the criticism of the “involvement in global military intervention and virtual enforced rearmament,” could strike a chord with many former East Germans. Only the frequent use of words like “nation” and “homeland” distinguishes the flyer from many of the left-wing anti-G8 tracts.

German authorities are already gearing up to prevent violent clashes between left and right-wing extremists at the G8. Of course, the vast majority of protestors will not turn to violence. The most prominent demonstrator among them will be Bono, the U2 singer and activists who has hailed Germany for its commitment to increase official development aid to 0.7 percent of GDP per year, and who will give a concert at one of the G8 protest sites on June 7.

The big political news coming out of Europe this week was the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in France. In Washington, the imminent arrival of Sarkozy--already hailed as the “most pro-American president in recent French history” (admittedly, the competition for this accolade is not that stiff)--is seen as welcome news. In his acceptance speech, Sarkozy assured his “American friends” that “France will always be on their side when they need her." At the same time, however, Sarkozy made only brief references to his “European partners,” and he failed to mention Germany--traditionally France’s closest EU ally. In fact, he spent more time making the case for a Mediterranean Union “linking Europe and Africa” than he did talking about the European Union.

Merkel and Sarkozy, REGIERUNGonline / Kühler

So what are the implications of Sarkozy’s election for future relations between Paris and Berlin, the so-called “couple franco-allemand?" In general, German newspaper commentators have welcomed Sarkozy’s win and see it as an opportunity for renewed Franco-German cooperation, especially with regard to the stalled EU constitutional treaty. As the Financial Times Deutschland put it:

The more sedate German chancellor Angela Merkel and the bundle of energy that is Sarkozy appear at first glance to come from two different planets. However, they have certain elements in common. Both have fundamentally favorable attitudes towards the United States. Both favor pragmatism over principles and grand visions in the way they do politics. That surely cannot hurt the European project--many EU citizens are tired of big words anyway.

Sarkozy wants to water down the EU constitution to the necessary institutional reforms and then pass it without a referendum. For Europe it could be the much longed-for kiss that wakes it from the slumber that it has been in since the failed referenda.

Sarkozy and Merkel are also united in their strong opposition to Turkey’s attempt to join the European Union. This is a stunning reversal of political fortunes for Ankara, which, back home, is plagued by massive political tensions between Islamist and secular forces. Just 18 months ago, then-German chancellor Schroeder and outgoing French president Chirac were the most powerful advocates of Turkish EU membership.